It’s time to continue with our journey into the past to unveil the mysteries of the Battle for Wesnoth Project and its history. This time, we’ll take a look at the third major version of Wesnoth ever released, which succeeds versions 0.1, 0.2 and 0.2.1.

I have not been able to find a package for Wesnoth 0.2.1, but it also happens to be the first version to have changelog entries which can be found even nowadays in SVN trunk:

Version 0.2.1:
* many redraw bugs fixed
* new scenarios added
* many new graphics added that were contributed by Paco
* infinite recall bug fixed
* recalling now costs 20 gold pieces. Gold from previous scenarios carries over,
and there is a bonus for finishing a scenario early
* better transitions between tiles added (graphics for this not complete though)

Nonetheless, Wesnoth 0.3 — packaged on July 29th 2003 and including a lot of hidden files created by vi/vim and other applications — includes more changes than the changelog entries in SVN would lead us to believe.

1. An initial outlook

This is apparently the first version where it’s possible to disable fullscreen mode without hacking the source — which is what I did with 0.1 and 0.2. As many other trivial user interface elements, this one is hastily implemented in the form of any (yep, any) command line argument that you can think of. So for example, wesnoth FooBar is enough to start in windowed mode. I’ll go back to the source code later.

In any case, Wesnoth still runs only on a 1024x768 video surface, which is a pain to use with my 1280x800 laptop display.

Now we have a titlescreen! Great — and apparently we can load and save games at the end of a scenario too.

And there are actual (automatically-advancing) story screens now, including an unfinished preliminary map of Wesnoth that’s not really related to our current Great Continent in any way. You may notice that the story text in this opportunity is not the same as in versions 0.1 and 0.2 — and this is where the creative divergence between David White and Francisco Muñoz, mentioned in my interview with Dave, starts to become a little more evident. But more of that later, let’s play the game first!